Andros

Andros is the northernmost island of the Greek Cyclades archipelago, located 6 miles southeast of Euboea. Around 3000 BC, Andros had the fortified village of Strofilias located on its west coast, and it predated the Cycladians. The island was inhabited by a mixture of Ionians and Thracians, and it supplied ships to Xerxes I in 480 BC before being enrolled in the Delian League. In 411 BC, Andros proclaimed its freedom from Athens, and it withstood an Athenian attack in 408 BC. In 333 BC, Antipater had Andros garrisoned by Macedonian soldiers, but it was freed by the Egyptians in 308 BC. In 246 BC, Andros again fell under Macedonian control, and it was captured by the Kingdom of Pergamon in 200 BC and ceded to the Roman Republic in 133 BC after Pergamon was incorporated into Rome. During the long centuries of Byzantine rule, Andros was relatively obscure, and, while it suffered from raids by the Saracens, it flourished due to its silk production. In 1204, after the Fourth Crusade, Andros came under Venetian control, and almost its entire population was carried off by the Ottomans after a raid in 1416, and the Genoese briefly captured Andros in 1431 before it reverted to Venetian control. In 1470, the Ottomans again took all but 2,000 residents of the island, and, in 1566, the Ottomans took control of the island. In the early 1770s, the Imperial Russian Navy occupied the island and used it as a base in the Aegean Sea during its war with the Ottomans until 1774, and, in 1821, the island became a part of independent Greece during the Greek War of Independence. In 2011, Andros had a population of 9,221 people.